Friday, October 7, 2011

iSad

I'm not sure if there is any category of people who were more affected by Steve Jobs' innovations than photographers and the photography minded. Everything Jobs masterminded at Apple was elegant and visual. Everything Apple innovated made life easier and better for the viewing, management, and simple pleasure of working with and looking at photographs. To say he will be greatly missed is an understatement.

But in many ways, Jobs will not be gone from Apple. He consistently put the right people in to the right positions so that his creativity, insight, marketing genius, and his ability to “Think Different” can continue. Jobs put it best himself:

“My model for business is The Beatles: They were four guys that kept each other’s negative tendencies in check; they balanced each other. And the total was greater than the sum of the parts. Great things in business are not done by one person, they are done by a team of people.”

During his life, I always thought of Jobs as arrogant. Now and as we read more and more about his personal life and thoughts, and ponder his remarkable achievements, I think he was modest.

7 comments:

Maybe anyone who truly blazes his own path, who eschews consensus and focus groups and public opinion and follows his heart despite the risk of failure, maybe anyone who takes all that to the extreme that Steve Jobs did will always come across as arrogant. Maybe it's only by not caring whether people will think you're arrogant that you can be free to take your ideas to places everyone else is afraid to go.

Now iSad too. Perhaps you found my comment too harsh by at least a shade. Perhaps you don't like people disagreeing with you. Perhaps this forum shares in the epic silence that is a condition of the art world (there's nothing dumber than an artist, to paraphrase Duchamp). But I think that each criticism has its merits. Perhaps I'll try again:

Your initial valuation of him is correct. He was arrogant. He was also a failure, because he ruled by fear and not inspiration. He treated others, especially those who were dependent on him, with a complete lack of respect. His thinking was not critical but success based. Ultimately, his devices and toys have served to distance us from each other. Partly due to this perfect poster boy for brute capitalism, we now have to contend with a generation that has replaced ideology with a nerdish delight in gadgets. Maybe that's why we are where we are today.

If I feel a comment is gratuitously unkind or in my opinion wrong, I feel free not to publish it. If someone wants to contextualize it as you did on your second try I sometimes reconsider. But a blog is personal and subjective - so I feel no compunction to post any comment I don't want to.

I think when you look up Luddite in the dictionary you will see a picture of Martin Blink. And while I think his petty peeves about Steve Jobs reveal a bad personal experience, I also think he is confused about a) what it means to run a company and b) what it means to be a capitalist. And without getting into a disquisition on that, I will just say that history is on Jobs’ side. Anyone who didn’t like his management style had the freedom to leave his employ; anyone who chose to work for Apple or who owns the stock probably loves him. Certainly the people who bought his products love him and his company. The ultimate irony in Mr. Blink’s statement is his oh-so-world-weary concluding complaint about “why we are where we are today.” It sounds a lot like the cri de coeur of the Occupy Wall Street protesters—whose very protests and communications are being made on products developed by Jobs and his company. Mr. Blink should not blame society’s tools for the ills of society.

"If only all blogs were as life-affirming and tender-hearted as that of gallerist James Danziger. Whether his focus falls on the work of an individual artist or a particular theme, The Year in Pictures is compulsive reading."